PirateBay Moves Domains — different ccTLDs have different policies and operate in different jurisdictions, because ICANN gives them broad discretion to operate the country code domains. However, post-Snowden, governments are turning on the US’s stewardship of critical Internet bodies, so look for governments (i.e., law enforcement) to be meddling a lot more in DNS, IP addresses, routing, and other things which thus far have been (to good effect) fairly neutrally managed.

Udacity/Thrun Profile — A student taking college algebra in person was 52% more likely to pass than one taking a Udacity class, making the $150 price tag–roughly one-third the normal in-state tuition–seem like something less than a bargain. In which Udacity pivots to hiring-sponsored workforce training and the new educational revolution looks remarkably like sponsored content.

Amazon is Building Substations (GigaOm) — the company even has firmware engineers whose job it is to rewrite the archaic code that normally runs on the switchgear designed to control the flow of power to electricity infrastructure. Pretty sure that wasn’t a line item in the pitch deck for “the first Internet bookstore”.

Panoramic Images — throw the camera in the air, get a 360×360 image from 36 2-megapixel lenses. Not sure that throwing was previously a recognised UI gesture.

Rules of the Internet, Bigness of the Data, Wifi ADCs, and Google Flirts with Client-Side Encryption

Ten Rules of the Internet (Anil Dash) — they’re all candidates for becoming “Dash’s Law”. I like this one the most: When a company or industry is facing changes to its business due to technology, it will argue against the need for change based on the moral importance of its work, rather than trying to understand the social underpinnings.

Data Storage by Vertical (Quartz) — The US alone is home to 898 exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion gigabytes)—nearly a third of the global total. By contrast, Western Europe has 19% and China has 13%. Legally, much of that data itself is property of the consumers or companies who generate it, and licensed to companies that are responsible for it. And in the US—a digital universe of 898 exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion gigabytes)—companies have some kind of liability or responsibility for 77% of all that data.

x-OSC — a wireless I/O board that provides just about any software with access to 32 high-performance analogue/digital channels via OSC messages over WiFi. There is no user programmable firmware and no software or drivers to install making x-OSC immediately compatible with any WiFi-enabled platform. All internal settings can be adjusted using any web browser.

Google Experimenting with Encrypting Google Drive (CNet) — If that’s the case, a government agency serving a search warrant or subpoena on Google would be unable to obtain the unencrypted plain text of customer files. But the government might be able to convince a judge to grant a wiretap order, forcing Google to intercept and divulge the user’s login information the next time the user types it in. Advertising depends on the service provider being able to read your data. Either your Drive’s contents aren’t valuable to Google advertising, or it won’t be a host-resistant encryption process.

Behind the Banner — visualization of what happens in the 150ms when the cabal of data vultures decide which ad to show you. They pass around your data as enthusiastically as a pipe at a Grateful Dead concert, and you’ve just as much chance of getting it back. (via John Battelle)

Terra — a simple, statically-typed, compiled language with manual memory management […] designed from the beginning to interoperate with Lua. Terra functions are first-class Lua values created using the terra keyword. When needed they are JIT-compiled to machine code. (via Hacker News)

Metaphor Identification in Large Texts Corpora (PLOSone) — The paper presents the most comprehensive study of metaphor identification in terms of scope of metaphorical phrases and annotated corpora size. Algorithms’ performance in identifying linguistic phrases as metaphorical or literal has been compared to human judgment. Overall, the algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art algorithm with 71% precision and 27% averaged improvement in prediction over the base-rate of metaphors in the corpus.

“It’s quite simply a tenancy fee. A licensing fee that the marketer pays every single month. It’s based on a minimum of a six-month commitment. There’s two different tiers, a $50,000-per-month level and a $75,000-per-month level.” [Discussed at the 4:12 mark.]

Take a look at some of the views BrandVoice companies are getting. You can see why marketers would be interested. Read more…

Inside the South Korean Cyber Attack (Ars Technica) — about thirty minutes after the broadcasters’ networks went down, the network of Korea Gas Corporation also suffered a roughly two-hour outage, as all 10 of its routed networks apparently went offline. Three of Shinhan Bank’s networks dropped offline as well […] Given the relative simplicity of the code (despite its Roman military references), the malware could have been written by anyone.

BotNet Racking Up Ad Impressions — observed the Chameleon botnet targeting a cluster of at least 202 websites. 14 billion ad impressions are served across these 202 websites per month. The botnet accounts for at least 9 billion of these ad impressions. At least 7 million distinct ad-exchange cookies are associated with the botnet per month. Advertisers are currently paying $0.69 CPM on average to serve display ad impressions to the botnet.

Legal Manual for Cyberwar (Washington Post) — the main reason I care so much about security is that the US is in the middle of a CyberCommie scare. Politicians and bureaucrats so fear red teams under the bed that they’re clamouring for legal and contra methods to retaliate, and then blindly use those methods on domestic disobedience and even good citizenship. The parallels with the 50s and McCarthy are becoming painfully clear: we’re in for another witch-hunting time when we ruin good people (and bad) because a new type of inter-state hostility has created paranoia and distrust of the unknown. “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the nmap team?”

Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large Scale Field Experiment (PDF) — We ﬁnd that new and infrequent users are positively inﬂuenced by ads but that existing loyal users whose purchasing behavior is not inﬂuenced by paid search account for most of the advertising expenses, resulting in average returns that are negative. We discuss substitution to other channels and implications for advertising decisions in large ﬁrms. eBay-commissioned research, so salt to taste. (via Guardian)

The Human Microbiome 101 (SlideShare) — SciFoo alum Jonathan Eisen’s talk. Informative, but super-notable for “complexity is astonishing, massive risk for false positive associations”. Remember this the next time your Big Data Scientist (aka kid with R) tells you one surprising variable predicts 66% of anything. I wish I had the audio from this talk!

The frequency of sponsored posts looks set to grow.

This week, I found that one of my Facebook updates received significantly more attention that others I’ve posted. On the one hand, it was a share of an important New York Times story focusing on the first time a baby was cured of HIV. But I discovered something that went beyond the story itself: someone who was not my friend had paid to sponsor one of my posts.

According to Facebook, the promoted post had 27 times as many views because it was sponsored this way, with 96% of the views coming through the sponsored version.

When I started to investigate what had happened, I learned that I’d missed some relevant news last month. Facebook had announced that users would be able to promote the posts of friends. My situation, however, was clearly different: Christine Harris, the sponsor of my post, is not my friend.

When I followed up with Elisabeth Diana, Facebook’s advertising communications manager, she said this was part of the cross-promote feature that Facebook rolled out. If a reporter posts a public update to his followers on Facebook, Diana explained to me in an email, that update can be promoted and “boosted” to the reporter’s friends.

While I couldn’t find Harris on Facebook, Diana said with “some certainty” that she was my follower, “in order to have seen your content.” Harris definitely isn’t my friend, and while she may well be one of my followers, I have no way to search them to determine whether that’s so. Read more…

10 Trends That Are Changing Cities Forever (Business Insider) — the only one of these “The n (Massive|Coming|IBM|Important|Critical|Deadly|Brobdignagian) Trends That Will Transform <noun> Forever And Herald The End of Days So Grab Your Ankles And Kiss Your Ass Goodbye Sinners ‘Cos This Is Doom Writ Large Mofos And You Better Get Your Act Together Or You’ll Be Left Behind Along With The Westboro Baptist Church and Everyone Who Ever `Liked’ Carly Rae Jepson on Facebook Yo” articles that ever said anything I was interested in reading. (via Alex Howard)

I’m Not The Product, But I Play One On The Internet (Derek Powazek) — his point is that it’s not business model that’s to blame, it’s that companies do not respect their customers. [W]e should not assume that, just because we pay a company they’ll treat us better, or that if we’re not paying that the company is allowed to treat us like shit. Reality is just more complicated than that. What matters is how companies demonstrate their respect for their customers. We should hold their feet to the fire when they demonstrate a lack of respect.

Rebuilding The Web We Lost (Anil Dash) — [T]here’s a huge opportunity to make a great new generation of human-friendly apps with positive social values. Cf Derek’s article above, there’s a lot of thoughtful reflection happening right now.

Drone Show, Ads, GitHub's Importance, and Crowdfunding Science

On Thneeds and the Death of Display Ads (John Battelle) — the video interstitial. Once anathema to nearly every publisher on the planet, this full page unit is now standard on the New York Times, Wired, Forbes, and countless other publishing sites. And while audiences may balk at seeing a full-page video ad after clicking from a search engine or other referring agent, the fact is, skipping the ad is about as hard as turning the page in a magazine. And in magazines, full page ads work for marketers. If you’d raised a kid on AdBlocker, and then at age 15 she saw the ad-filled Internet for the first time, she’d think her browser had been taken over by malware. (via Tim Bray)

Crowdfunded Genomics — a girl with a never-before-seen developmental disorder had her exome (the useful bits of DNA) sequenced, and a never-before-seen DNA mutation found. The money for it was raised by crowdfunding. (via Ed Yong)

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